Enterprises

Simple Client-facing Documents

We've been working on a new product, Echo Publish. (www.EchoPublish.com) It's a straighforward product that satisfies a simple need: to let your systems generate professional client documents (contracts, correspondence, etc) from templates defined by your business experts.

Curiously, it's a market that's currently ill-served. Alternative solutions tend to be very costly, overly technical, or inflexible. (Oh, and often dependent on MS Word).

The initial development of Echo Publish was for 9yds, (www.9yds.com), a service providing full administration facilities for private and commercial landlords. They use it to create contracts and other legal documentation, as well as a myriad of emails they need for day-to-day operations. Read more about that implementation here: http://www.echopublish.com/pdf/EP_Glanty_PR.pdf.

Our goals for Echo Publish have been to make it:

Simple for business experts to define the document templates they need using familiar tools

Simple for IT to integrate into systems through an interface that is sensible and based on open standards.

Versatile enough to produce documents in the formats that businesses most often require.

Available at low enough cost so that even start-ups with small volumes can afford it.

How it Works

It really is this simple:

Templates + Data = Documents

Let's unpack that formula.

Templates

Templates are created by business experts as documents in your own Google Drive account.

Templates in plain-text formats like HTML or Markdown result in output documents in those formats. This is very useful for emails, SMS content, etc.

You can use a very rich but intuitive templating language to populate the templates with business data, and even to control the logical structure of your documents.

Data

Your applications provide the data that Echo Publish uses to populate the templates.

This data can be in XML or JSON formats, and can be structured to suit your data models.

For development purposes, you can define test sets of data.

+ (The "plus" in the formula above)

Your data is merged with the templates through a simple web service call to our Echo Publish service.

The only required parameters to this call are:

Which template is to be used?

What type of template is it?

What is the payload of business data to merge?

Additional parameters unlock a host of options.

= Documents

The response from Echo Publish, will contain one or more links to documents produced.

Optionally, Echo Publish can upload the documents to your own Google Drive account.

Alternatively, you can download the documents as DOCXs, or PDFs, or HTMLs or whatever format you have chosen, for further handling by your systems.

Why not take a look? www.EchoPublish.com is up and running: the website lets you play with some examples to get the general idea of what the service does. There is also a form to register your interest in a trial account - with no commitment - should you wish to explore further.